December 30, 2006

Eh... The NYT is covering it, so I'm flagging it for you. Maybe you're interested in the 50-year-old "administrative assistant at a sex-related entertainment company" who decides to become a porn actress because she "loves sex" and "wanted to do something different." So she says! Her husband supports her because "She’s doing it for the right reasons." The "right reasons." I love that. What are the wrong reasons? Presumably: money, to please someone else, low self-esteem. You know, all those things that motivate those other people. But not you. You just love sex and have a wonderful sense of adventure. Well, that's just peachy. Celebrate yourself.

So I find the woman really pretty dull... because she thinks she's exciting. I'm more interested in the director:

The director, Urbano Martin, points his camera strategically, scarcely disguising his boredom. “I shoot specialty films,” he explains during a break in filming, adding that he has been in the business for 17 years. “Fat women, old women, hairy girls — all kinds. We feed the niche.”

The market for beautiful, airbrushed young women “is oversaturated,” he says. “This is more normal people, more meat on the bone, like what you have at home.”

Now, this guy is a human being: suitably bored by what is boring and working for the money. Mature-woman porn is not some NYT-appropriate culture trend. It's just one more way to find a niche in a saturated market.

15 comments:

“I’m too old for that. I don’t know that there’s anyone out there I could easily find who could understand that the reason I’m not having sexual climax this morning isn’t because I don’t love her. It’s because I have to go to work.”

He sounds almost... robotic.

Invites the question: Would it be morally wrong, in one's lucid dream that is, to rape a 66 year old drugged up robotic human sex machine?

The quote from her boss is quite amusing: "[i]t’s crazy. This is supposed to be an industry with the youngest, newest, most beautiful girls in the world. Isn’t youth what everyone wants?" To me, it just seems so obvious that the answer is "no" that the question itself seems absurd.

The thought occurs -- and for some reason, this sounds a little Bob Wright-ish -- that it's logical that this trend would emerge. The cultural and aesthetic fetishization of youth has biological origins in the reproductive imperative: the instinct to reproduce makes young, physically fit women seem most attractive because they are the most likely to be able to bear and raise children. But if technology allows society to uncouple sex from reproduction - which modern society has done - the biological imperative is, if not obsolete, then no longer of paramount importance. While the biological-cultural inclination towards seeing youth as an appealing quality has enormous momentum, it no longer makes much logical sense, and other considerations are now free to come into play. That includes personal aesthetic tastes, which are naturally many and varied. Some people go out and buy a kitten. Other people go out and buy an adult cat. Likewise, absent cultural conditioning, there is nothing inherently attractive about being under twenty, or inherently less so in being over 50.

Or perhaps I'm just trying to rationalize my own psychosis, you know, whatever.

Seems like a fairly natural development for the baby-boom generation. It might seem like a niche at the moment, but I don't see boomers, or succeeding generations, giving up sex at 60, or 45, or 30, or whatever just because someone else imagines they should stop that and start playing shuffleboard. (As if that weren't a slippery slope anyway -- recall that John Derbyshire infamously writes that women are over the hill before they reach the age of consent.)

figleaf said... "Seems like a fairly natural development for the baby-boom generation."

Right, but what's really interesting in the NYT article is that it indicates that it isn't the baby boomers who are, uh, "consuming" this product: "[b]y far the most avid consumers of older-woman pornography, producers say, are young men." I mean, I don't think that you can really frame the story here, as you do, in terms of the boomers, because if this is a niche market, it isn't created by the desires of a few baby boomers to star in porno movies, any more than the niche for "girls gone wild" videos is created by by a desire of a few sophomores to appear in those movies. These movies are being made to cater to a niche market that exists because because there is a demand for it. Youth as the sine qua non of sexuality is over.

David L. said... "Looks as though the lady's daughter, Stephany Schwartz, is also in the porn business, under the screen name Jewel De'Nyle

It's going to be a tense Christmas in that household when the mom sells more DVDs than the daughter, isn't it? Freud would have a field day.

If you say so but don't think that will stop the rest of us from trying.

Simon said..."Likewise, absent cultural conditioning, there is nothing inherently attractive about being under twenty, or inherently less so in being over 50."

Very true.

In fact, being over 50 is often inherently more erotically interesting.

For instance, at my advanced age, I seem to be continually meeting wise, talented, sentient and maturely sensuous women of great depth and experience whose subtlety, humor, discernment, and intelligence energizes for them layer upon layer of inherent pulchritude.

And, incidentlally, it seems they tend not to be wasting their time making boring old porn.

Simon said: "...what's really interesting in the NYT article is that it indicates that it isn't the baby boomers who are, uh, "consuming" this product: "[b]y far the most avid consumers of older-woman pornography, producers say, are young men."

All true. Boomers aren't going to be as embarrassed to admit they're still sexually active, and young men are less shy than their elders to admit an attraction to older women. Assuming both (only slightly related) trends continue, we may all encounter considerably less bias when it's *our turn* to become senior citizens.

"Now, this guy is a human being: suitably bored by what is boring and working for the money. Mature-woman porn is not some NYT-appropriate culture trend. It's just one more way to find a niche in a saturated market."